EU Council of Ministers Approves Copyright Directive, Including Article 17 (13) – (Updated) by Andy on April 15, 2019
The EU Council of Ministers has approved the Copyright Directive, which includes the controversial Article 17 (formerly 13). The legislation was voted through by a majority of EU ministers just a few minutes ago, despite opposition from Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Finland, and Sweden.
https://torrentfreak.com/eu-ministers-approve-copyright-directive-including-article-17-13-190415/
Southern Baptist Take on Interesting philosophical position on AI.
If nothing else, shows the ability to shoe-horn anything as anticipated by scripture.
Artificial Intelligence: An Evangelical Statement of Principles
As followers of Christ, we are called to engage the world around us with the unchanging gospel message of hope and reconciliation. Tools like technology are able to aid us in this pursuit. We know they can also be designed and used in ways that dishonor God and devalue our fellow image-bearers. Evangelical Christians hold fast to the inerrant and infallible Word of God, which states that every human being is made in God’s image and thus has infinite value and worth in the eyes of their Creator. This message dictates how we view God, ourselves, and the tools that God has given us the ability to create.
In light of existential questions posed anew by the emergent technology of artificial intelligence (AI), we affirm that God has given us wisdom to approach these issues in light of Scripture and the gospel message. Christians must not fear the future or any technological development because we know that God is, above all, sovereign over history, and that nothing will ever supplant the image of God in which human beings are created. We recognize that AI will allow us to achieve unprecendented <sp> possibilities, while acknowledging the potential risks posed by AI if used without wisdom and care.
We desire to equip the church to proactively engage the field of AI, rather than responding to these issues after they have already affected our communities. In light of this desire and hope, we offer the following affirmations and denials about the nature of humanity, the promise of technology, and the hope for the future.
The New York Times sells premium ads based on how an article makes you feel – Poynter –
Engineered to give you All the feels sell for more money
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2019/the-new-york-times-sells-premium-ads-based-on-how-an-article-makes-you-feel/
The Only Answer Is Less Internet
Our emerging post-privacy order isn’t quite totalitarian, but it’s getting there. By Ross Douthat Apr 13 2019
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/opinion/china-internet-privacy.html>
In our age of digital connection and constantly online life, you might say that two political regimes are evolving, one Chinese and one Western, which offer two kinds of relationships between the privacy of ordinary citizens and the newfound power of central authorities to track, to supervise, to expose and to surveil.
The first regime is one in which your every transaction can be fed into a system of ratings and rankings, in which what seem like merely personal mistakes can cost you your livelihood and reputation, even your ability to hail a car or book a reservation. It’s one in which notionally private companies cooperate with the government to track dissidents and radicals and censor speech; one in which your fellow citizens act as enforcers of the ideological consensus, making an example of you for comments you intended only for your friends; one in which even the wealth and power of your overlords can’t buy privacy.
The second regime is the one they’re building in the People’s Republic of China.
This is a dark joke; it isn’t meant to minimize the horrors of China’s march into information-age totalitarianism. Beginning with its successful taming of the internet, Beijing has treated the darkest episodes of “Black Mirror” as a how-to guide for social control and subjugation — with “social credit” scores and official public shamings for people whose daily conduct disappoints, official Communist Party apps that you’d better use if you know what’s good for you, surveillance technologies and facial recognition software as boots on the back of nonapproved religions, and compulsory internet as part of the brutal, tech-enabled replay of the Cultural Revolution imposed in China’s Muslim west.
What’s happening in the West with privacy and authority is happily different. Unlike China’s system, our emerging post-privacy order is not (for now) totalitarian; its impositions are more decentralized and haphazard, more circumscribed and civilized, less designed and more evolved, more random in the punishments inflicted and the rules enforced.
This means that, for instance, there is no central party apparatus encouraging our corporations to create individual “trust scores” for every consumer (even if they’re still doing it), no official commissars organizing digital mobs (even if shaming for random wrongthink is now a commonplace), no political persecution involved in most cases where public figures have their secrets and selfies exposed on the internet. (Perhaps Jeff Bezos’s claims of Saudi involvement will pan out, but so far he mostly seems to have been the victim of his own stupidity and his mistress’s brother’s greed.) And it means that the radicals surveilled by corporate-government cooperation are mostly white nationalists and jihadists, not human rights advocates and Christian pastors, as in China.
But this list of real differences is still also a list of partial similarities, of ways in which the architecture of our system replicates certain features of the emergent Chinese panopticon, even if the life lived within our system is still blessedly freer than in theirs.
Indeed our system cannot help recreating features of the Chinese order, because the way that we live on the internet leaves us naked before power in a radical new way. In the West that power is still decentralized, diffuse, divided and polarized, and therefore likely to be limited and checked. But to adapt Deng Xiaoping’s famous call for “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the Western order in the internet age might be usefully described as a “liberalism with some police-state characteristics.” Those characteristics are shaped and limited by our political heritage of rights and individualism. But there is still plainly an authoritarian edge, a gentle “pink police state” aspect, to the new world that online life creates.
And what’s striking is how easily we have come to tolerate it. Yes, there are moments when particular organs of surveillance get pushback — the N.S.A. during the brief “libertarian moment” starring Rand Paul and Edward Snowden, the social media companies from liberals when it turned out that the Trump digital team no less than the Obama whiz kids could exploit their user data.
But apart from the high-minded and the paranoid, privacy per se is not a major issue in our politics. Most people want the convenience of the internet far more than they want the private spaces that older forms of communication protected. They shrug off the stalker-ish ways that corporations hurl their ads at you throughout your day. They put surveillance devices in their homes and pockets without a qualm. They accept hackings and online shamings the way a Californian shrugs off earthquakes. They assume that the extremists being surveilled and censored and sometimes arrested probably deserve it. And they welcome the possible advantages of panoptical living, hoping for less crime and less police misconduct, better public health, more exposure of corruption — plus, of course, the chance to see their favorite celebrities in the nude.
[snip]
Tracking Phones, Google Is a Dragnet for the Police The tech giant records people’s locations worldwide.
Now, investigators are using it to find suspects and witnesses near crimes, running the risk of snaring the innocent. By JENNIFER VALENTINO-DeVRIES APRIL 13, 2019 When detectives in a Phoenix suburb arrested a warehouse worker in a murder investigation last December, they credited a new technique with breaking open the case after other leads went cold.
Incognito mode won’t keep your browing private – do this instead
Browser compartmentalization can help you escape the clutches of the data gathering machine.
Users will use one browser for any and all websites they need to log in to. This browser is the one on which they’ll access their social media, banks, and shopping sites.
The big catch here is that users will never use this browser to search the web or randomly browse the internet. This browser is only used for bookmarked sites you need to log in to. Let’s call this your “accounts” browser.
Users will then use a second browser for all their web searching and random browsing. On this browser, a user will never log into any website–ever. They will never use this browser to personally identify themselves in any way, period. We’ll call this your “everyday” browser.